1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to activities on the internet, whether they are commercial, non-commercial or business activities. In particular, the present invention relates to associating commercial, non-commercial, or business activities on the Internet with geographical locations.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
The Internet has brought more and more of our daily activities into a virtual or online world. In the online world, information is represented by binary data that can be transported around the globe reliably at great speed and practically at no cost. Such information is stored, analyzed and retrieved with great efficiency. For example, when a customer carries out a text-based online chat session with a customer service representative, a record of that conversation (e.g., a transcript) can be preserved for later retrieval and analysis a long time after the time of the conversation. Had the conversation occurred in person, or over a telephone call, preservation of that conversation for subsequent retrieval would not be a simple task. (You can certainly argue that there is potential danger and evil in the ability to accurately and permanently record such events for later use; there are certainly reasons for their judicious use and to guard against abuse zealously.)
Even in the online world, there is often a need to refer to the real physical world. For example, many online sites or mobile application programs (“apps”) support location-based services (“LBS”). For example, when a user whose geographical location is known searches for a coffee shop on an online map (e.g., an on-line map website or app), the on-line map would preferentially show coffee shops in the user's local area, such as illustrated in FIG. 1. When such a search is performed on a mobile device (e.g., a cellular telephone), the search results are typically automatically prioritized according to distance from the mobile device's current geographical location. To determine the current location, the mobile device typically includes a global positioning system (GPS) receiver or a comparable location determination component in the mobile device. Using the current location so determined, an LBS server then accesses a database that “geo-tags” merchants or businesses with their positions expressed, for example, in GPS coordinates. Geo-tagging is also widely used with photographs. To geo-tag a photograph, a camera in a GPS-equipped or position-aware mobile device (e.g., a cellular telephone) includes in the photograph's image file the mobile device's position at the time the photograph is taken. In fact, today's professional cameras are likely to be equipped with a built-in GPS unit. Such a camera embeds its current geographical location by default into the image file whenever a photograph is taken.
LBS or geo-tagging methods have been used for many years. In general, however, their uses have been limited because of many disadvantages. First, a user's current location may implicate serious privacy concerns. Once a person's true current geographical location becomes accessible online, that information is vulnerable to being sniffed, hijacked, misappropriated, taken advantage of or otherwise abused. Second, frequent use of the GPS module in a mobile device drains precious battery power. Third, an industry standard GPS receiver does not work very well inside buildings, especially in a multi-story building. Much effort has been focused on developing “indoor GPS”. In indoor GPS, indoor positions may be determined using known positions of WiFi access points (hotspots). There are a diverse variety of methods for performing indoor positioning. However, none of these methods are completely satisfactory yet.
For businesses, using an office location as the online LBS location of a business seems straightforward, but there are often complications. For example, in a high-rise office building, or in a multi-level indoor mall, many businesses share the same planar position (i.e., same latitude and longitude coordinates), even though they can be distinguished on the basis of altitude or elevation. Positions of these businesses thus overlap in a 2-D or aerial-view map. A 3-D rendering, or a 2-D rendering augmented by discrete levels, is simply too involved. For small home-based businesses, using the actual geographical location would reveal a home address, which implicates privacy and safety concerns. However, to establish an office address merely to insulate the home from the business may be costly.
Some on-line applications are based on imaginary locations in virtual worlds. FIGS. 2(a) and 2(b) illustrate uses of imaginary locations in a virtual world in 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional renditions, respectively. In some applications, for example, a user in a virtual world may be represented by an avatar, which is allowed to freely roam the virtual world. A treasure hunting game is an example of such an application. Such applications, which allow for great creative and artistic expressions, are typically found in gaming, social media, and education. However, many techniques developed for virtual worlds are not used in applications related to the actual geographical locations in the real physical world.